It’s a holiday week. But when this morning’s paper delivered yet another op-ed by Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, citing (and breaking an embargo on) yet another, misleading and manipulative two-author analysis of breast cancer screening by him and one other scientist, I thought it worth documenting some concerns.

I’ll start by mentioning that Dr. Welch and I seem to agree on one point – that women should have access to information so they might make reasoned decisions about breast cancer screening. He refers, also, to controversy among professionals about the relative benefits and harms of screening mammography. That there is debate is incontrovertible. No argument there.

The problem is that educated, middle-aged women are being nudged, and frightened, or even charmed into not going for mammography. Nudged, by papers like the one in JAMA today, which acknowledges controversy about statistics and then suggests a falsely low range for lives saved per number of women who get screened. Frightened, by headlines that highlight the risks of overdiagnosis, a statistical concept. If a woman finds out she has an early-stage breast tumor, she and her doctor can (and should) actively decide how much therapy she should have based on the molecular subtype of her tumor, stage and other factors. Just because you find a Stage 0 or small tumor by screening, doesn’t mean you have to over-treat it. If medical education were what it should be, there would be little or no overtreatment because doctors would discuss appropriate options with women and not advise them to have too much therapy. And charmed, yes – by the false notion that breast cancer is often nothing to worry about, that in many cases it can be let alone. That it might just disappear.

I am not aware of a single pathology-documented, published case of a breast tumor going away on its own. Yes, there are slow-growing tumors that may not do harm. But those tend to occur in older women. Those cases are, in general, irrelevant to discussions of breast cancer screening in women between the ages of 40 and 60 or so. What matters most in assessing screening benefits is the number of life-years saved, which is potentially huge for women in this age bracket, and quality of life changes due to the intervention, as assessed over decades.

Mammography (Wikimedia image)

For today, I’ll point to just a few issues in the JAMA paper. The authors state that among 1000 U.S. women age 50 years who are screened annually for a decade, “490 to 670 will have 1 false alarm.” But as detailed in Table 2 of their paper, it turns out the range for women who undergo false-positive biopsies is far lower: between approximately 50 and 100 per thousand women, depending on the age group and study from which the authors draw the “data.” What that means, according to the numbers they’ve culled from studies of non-specialized radiologists, is that only 1 in 10 women would undergo a breast biopsy, and not have cancer, per decade of screening. So the numbers of false positives involving biopsy are not so high.

Most of the false positives are callbacks for additional imaging. Welch and his colleague talk about frequency and anxiety produced by “false alarms.” They go as far as to cite studies documenting that “anxiety may persist for at least 3 years and produce psychological morbidity…” But if women appreciated the data to support that, in most cases – approximately 85 percent – breast cancer can be removed and metastatic disease avoided, over the long haul, by early detection, most of us, and certain anyone making decisions based on reason, wouldn’t mind the follow-up and worrying about irregularities noted on a screening test. Most of us can handle the emotional aspects, and uncertainty, of screening over the course of a few days. To suggest otherwise is patronizing.

Years ago, breast cancer screening was widely considered an act of empowerment, a way for women to take control of their bodies, and to avoid the disfiguring and sadly lethal effects of late-stage breast cancer, besides the potential need for treatment until the end of life. Now, mammography is more accurate and involves less radiation than ever before. Women might be demanding universal access to better, state-of-the-art facilities, rather than shying away from the test.

As for those women who do get called for needle breast biopsies, I say that’s not such an onerous prospect. What’s key is that the procedure be done under local anesthesia, under imaging (typically ultrasound) guidance in an office by a skilled radiologist. The sample should be reviewed by a well-trained breast pathologist, and molecular studies evaluated in a central lab that routinely runs those kinds of tests.

Finally, in the end of today’s op-ed, Welch suggests that the way to reduce uncertainties about breast cancer screening is to carry out costly and somehow randomized clinical trials to see how much and how often screening is needed to demonstrate a survival benefit. But, as his tone suggests, I suspect he doesn’t really favor investment in those clinical trials.

The fact is, I don’t either, at least not for mammography at this point in the U.S. As I and others have pointed out, it takes 15 – 20 years of follow-up in a trial to demonstrate that screening and early detection reduce breast cancer deaths. In North America, the availability of mammography correlates with a reduction in mortality from breast cancer by over a third. He and others have attributed improvements in survival to better treatments. I and others would suggest that while therapy has improved quite a bit since 1985, the greatest benefit derives from most women avoiding the need for life-long treatment by having small tumors found and removed before they’ve spread. This applies in over 80 percent of invasive cases. The survival boost is from the combination, with early detection playing a significant (large) role in the equation.

Why I don’t support starting new randomized trials for mammography, besides that they’d be costly and hard to carry out, is that we can’t wait 20 years to know how best and often to screen women. Rather, it would be better to spend those theoretical research dollars in finding how to prevent the disease. If in 20 years breast cancer is less common, as we all hope will be the case, and true positives are rare, screening of the population won’t be needed. (If breast cancer rates do climb, Bayes’ theorem would support screening, because the positive predictive value of the test would, unfortunately, be higher.) Either way, by 2034 the technology would have improved, or we might have a valid alternative to mammography for screening, and so the studies would be, again, out of date.

It would be better to spend what resources we invest in mammography on improving the quality of screening facilities, now, so that women who decide to go for the procedure can, at least, know that it’s being performed with modern equipment and by doctors and technicians who are capable of state-of-the-art procedures involving the lowest level of radiation exposure possible, careful reading of the images, and application of sonography to further examine the appearance of women with dense breasts, when needed.

On Sunday in Chicago, oncologists and others at the plenary session of the annual ASCO meeting will be talking about an abstract that matters a lot to women with breast cancer. It’s a study on Tamoxifen that bears on how long women with estrogen-receptor positive (ER+) tumors should take adjuvant hormonal therapy after initial treatment for early-stage BC.

tamoxifen binding an ER receptor (Wiki-Commons)

Why this matters so much is that ER+ tumors account for most BC cases. So if you’re a pre-menopausal woman who’s had a tumor removed by surgery, there’s a good chance your doctor will recommend adjuvant (“extra”) treatment with Tamoxifen for 5 or (probably) 10 years. The reasoning behind this recommendation is that the recently-published ATLAS study demonstrated a clear lengthening of life among women with ER+ tumors who took the longer course.

The usual dose of Tamoxifen (Nolvadex) is 20 milligrams per day. The bargain-rate cost is around $9 for a month’s supply GoodRx.com – so we’re talking just over $110/year x 5 or 10 years. That’s small change as oncology drugs go, although the numbers add up over so many patients affected…

Tamoxifen carries a small but real risk for what most doctors consider side effects, like blood clots and occasional, typically low-grade uterine cancers. The problem with Tamoxifen – which is not so much a risk as a definite consequence of taking this medication – is that it has anti-estrogen effects that many young (and older) women consider undesirable. Already our breasts have been cut. Feeling “feminine” is not trivial. Many don’t want it!

(Mental exercise: imagine hundreds of thousands of men ages 35-55 agreeably accepting a prescription for partial chemical castration to reduce the chances of a tumor recurring, after they’ve already had significant treatment to reduce those odds)

Your author has been in rooms filled with doctors where the overwhelming consensus expressed was that hormonal treatments in women with BC are terrific. Indeed, they extend life and, in some cases – such as those with low Oncotype scores – afford women the option of skipping chemo. But how are they so sure we’d rather take an anti-estrogen for 5-10 years rather than 3-6 months of chemo? Answer: I don’t think anyone knows.

One limitation of the ATLAS study (and as best I can tell the same for aTTom) is that the trial doesn’t distinguish between women who got adjuvant chemo and those who didn’t get chemo. So it’s unclear whether Tamoxifen helps prevent recurrence, or extend life, in women who’ve also received chemotherapy for the disease.

Here are 2 questions for aTTom:

1. How do we know that women with small, node-negative (low risk) tumors who receive chemotherapy, as is standard in many communities, get additional benefit from Tamoxifen after chemo?

2. Should pre-menopausal women with small, ER+ tumors be given a choice between taking chemo or Tamoxifen?

In other words, is there evidence to support the combination – chemo followed by hormonal Rx – as the standard, adjuvant care for women with early-stage, ER+ tumors? or that women prefer hormonal pills over a short course, like 4 cycles, of chemo?

I’m eager to hear about the updated aTTom (adjuvant Tamoxifen Treatment offers more?) findings, to be published and presented on Sunday. I hope my colleagues – doctors, patients, advocates and journalists will ask good questions!

It’s foggy today, October 3, ten years since the last mammogram I had and will ever need. I’ve been remiss in updating the blog. The reasons include family concerns and other projects. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the big picture – what’s most important for progress against breast cancer in the decade ahead.

So here’s what I see, now – in terms of three priority areas: improving treatment, prevention, and education to inform treatment decisions.

Pumpkins, organized by subtype (WikiCommons image)

As an oncologist, I perceive huge strides in understanding BC since the time of my diagnosis. But these advances are largely invisible to patients because they’re in the realm of pathology and classification of different subtypes. What was essentially a 3-type malignancy with a handful of treatment options has expanded under the molecular microscope to a spectrum of 4, 10 or – what’s probably most accurate – hundreds or thousands of patient-particular conditions, depending on the level of precision by which you define a disease. I’m optimistic, because it looks as though, in my lifetime, BC treatment will be tailored to each patient. There’ll be less surgery and better drugs.

The hitch, now, is not so much with science as with funding– funding to analyze each patient’s tumor at the genetic and protein levels, funding to pay for treatments selected by patients (which might include less treatment and/or palliative care in advanced cases), and funding to educate doctors about BC subtypes and medical progress, so they might offer “modern” advice to each patient in ordinary clinics, apart from clinical trials and academic centers. Newer is not always better in medical care. Same goes for more treatment (especially when it comes to higher doses). Still, the lag between advances in BC science and application of distinct, targeted and better treatments is frustrating at best.

Some of my colleagues call for patience – emphasizing that studies need be confirmed, drugs tested in mice, etc. Their point is that we can’t jump from pathology research and new BC classifications to new therapy. But one lesson I take from progress against AIDS is that maybe we shouldn’t be so patient. At least not for young people with poor-prognosis BC subtypes or stage. We could do studies and studies of particular BC treatments, and studies of studies (those would be meta-analyses) and debate 8 or 10 years from now whether a particular drug or combination of drugs worked in clinical trials that selected for patients with an antiquated subtype of the disease. Or we could move toward “n=1” trials, with smart, well-trained physicians assessing each patient by a combination of old-fashioned physical exams and the most modern of molecular studies of the tumors, considering the options, and moving forward with individual, mini-experimental treatment plans.

I vote for the latter. If the drug works in a patient with advanced BC and the patient feels better, why not?

For people with early-stage BC, prescribing or taking new and essentially untested drugs makes less sense at first glance. That’s because standard treatments are “successful” – leading to long-term remissions and possible cures in over 80 percent of those affected. But these relatively good results may have, paradoxically, hampered development of better drugs that could obviate the need for breast-deforming surgeries and radiation in many women. The possible application of BC drug cocktails, in lieu of surgery for early-stage patients, is a huge question for the future, and one for which trials would be necessary. Just getting those projects going – applying BC science to treatment of early-stage cases – would be a step in the right direction.

As for BC prevention, of course that would be infinitely better than detecting or treating the disease. Unfortunately, I think we’re farther away from preventing the disease than we are from having effective and less brutal treatments for most patients. The problem with lifestyle modification – like staying active and not obese – is that it’s far from full-proof: You can be seemingly fit as a fiddle and get a lethal case of BC. Still, there are plenty of other health-related reasons for women to exercise and eat sensibly. As for avoiding carcinogens or, first, just knowing what chemicals contribute to BC formation and growth, the science isn’t there yet. It’ll be a long haul before anyone can prove that a particular chemical causes this disease. That said, I advocate research in the slow-growing field of environmental oncology and wish there’d be more enthusiasm for regulating our exposure to likely-toxic chemicals.

The third priority is for improving education in math and science, starting at the elementary school level. Doctors need to understand statistics, but many don’t. They need to know about genomics and basic science in medicine. Patients need this kind of knowledge if they want to have a clue, if they want to engage meaningfully in decisions about which antibody to take, or pill, or whether they want to participate in a clinical trial of pills instead of surgery for a Stage II tumor with high levels of Her2, for example. That’d be a tough decision for an oncologist. I only wish that we could reach the point where we could have those kinds of truly informed conversations about clinical treatment of breast cancer, which happen every day.

We’ve got a lot of information in hand, but we need to learn how to apply that to more patients, faster and more openly.

This past week I read several attitude-altering articles about breast cancer.

Kathy Rich, as featured in ‘O’ Magazine

The first lesson, if I might call it that – in the way an oncologist can learn from variations in her patients’ pathology and clinical outcomes – comes from the case of Katherine Russell Rich, who died last week at the age of 56. As reported by Katherine O’Brien in the I Hate Breast Cancer Blog, Rich lived with metastatic BC (MBC) for 18 years. That’s phenomenal, was my first reaction to this news. The prognosis for MBC is said to be around 3 years, and Rich lived for 18 years beyond her tumor’s recurrence with stage IV disease.

As sad and unsatisfactory as this outcome may seem, and it is, Rich’s story offers hope for life beyond the 3 or 4 or 5 years some women with MBC pray, “ask” or otherwise bargain for, fingers-crossed…

As she detailed in an O article, Rich’s initial diagnosis came when she was 32 years old, in 1988. The Times, in an obituary, tells of her lumpectomy, chemo and radiation. In 1993 her cancer came back in bones including her spine. She had a bone marrow transplant, but the disease progressed. Ultimately, she coursed through various and some archaic hormone treatments.

Along the way, she lost or quit a job in publishing, or both, and traveled to India, and authored two books. In a 2010 first-person story about her case, she told of updating her status – of being alive – at Breastcancer.org each year. She wrote:

…I tell the women how deeply I believe there’s no such thing as false hope: all hope is valid, even for people like us, even when hope would no longer appear to be sensible.

Life itself isn’t sensible, I say. No one can say with ultimate authority what will happen — with cancer, with a job that appears shaky, with all reversed fortunes — so you may as well seize all glimmers that appear.

My take, as an oncologist and former clinician, is that patients sometimes surprise you. Hard to know which woman will respond to a non-targeted treatment, or even a drug like an estrogen modulator, without trying. And I wonder – and this is speculative, but maybe, likely, the two together – doctor and patient – worked together to see what worked in Rich’s case over nearly 2 decades, and what didn’t work.

A Bell Curve

If a drug helps, keep it going; if it hurts, stop. There are so many algorithms in medicine, and molecular tools, but maybe the bottom line is how the, one, your patient is doing.

Which leads me to another post, by Dr. David Gorski, a breast cancer surgeon and researcher who blogs as Orac – what once was imagined as a fabulously capable information processor, at Respectful Insolence. He describes how tough it can be to define, and thereby target or destroy, any individual patient’s breast tumor because the cancer cells are constantly changing. Within each woman’s tumor, an evolution-like process is ongoing, leading to selection of treatment-resistant cells. This is not news in oncology; the concept has been understood for years as it applies to “liquid” tumors like leukemia, as he points out.

In breast cancer, understanding the complexity of each case is more recent. Gorski considers a genetic analysis of 104 triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) cases presented at the recent AACR meeting and published last week in Nature:

“…The 59 scientists involved in this study expected to see similar gene profiles when they mapped on computer the genomes of 100 tumours.

But to their amazement they found no two genomes were similar, never mind the same. “Seeing these tumours at a molecular level has taught us we’re dealing with a continuum of different types of breast cancer here, not just one,” explains Steven Jones, co-author of this study.

…TNBC is not a single disease. In fact, even an individual TNBC tumor is not a single disease. Tumor cells evolve as they proliferate, so that the cells in them are genetically heterogeneous. The cells growing in one area of a tumor can and often do harbor markedly different genetic mutations from the cells growing in another part of the tumor…

The team found that each tumor displayed multiple “clonal genotypes,” suggesting that the cancer would have to be treated as multiple diseases, rather than a single entity.

So besides that there are distinct subtypes of breast cancer, those labeled as TNBC are diverse and contain variation within; each patient harbors sub-clones of malignant cells that, in principle, respond differently to treatment.

Orac, the fictional supercomputer (Wiki-Commons image)

Putting these links together –

The message from Katherine O’Brien, who lives with MBC and blogs about it, is that one outlier – like Katherine Russell Rich – can provide hope to other patients and, maybe, clues for scientists about why she lived for so long with metastatic BC. The message from Orac, a physician-scientist blogger, is how hard it is to pinpoint an individual breast tumor’s molecular aspects, because the disease is so mutable and diverse.

The problem, and this reflects evolution in my thinking over a long while, is that published data – the gold standard, what supports EBM – are largely limited to findings based on trials of groups. We understand now, better than we did 10 or 20 years ago, that each patient’s tumor is unique and can evolve over time, naturally or in response to therapy. Clinical trials, though rigorously planned and elaborately structured, are incredibly expensive and flip-floppy, disappointing overall.

What I’m thinking –

Algorithms – except in the broadest sense – may not offer the optimal approach to cancer treatment. Maybe the median doesn’t matter so much as we’d thought.

Here’s a ~retro idea: In 2012, maybe the ideal and most cost-effective oncology practice would blend low-tech observations – like findings on physical examination and how the patient’s feeling – with occasional, high-tech analyses – like markers for genetic drift within a tumor. If doctors are well-trained and non-robotic, in either the literal or figurative sense, and if they lack COIs regarding treatment decisions, they’d provide better, more effective and personalized treatments than what’s typically offered based on evidence reached through elaborate, costly clinical trials of many patients with similar but non-identical cancers.

This week the NIH launched a new website, NIH Clinical Research Trials and You. In a Feb 6 press release, NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said “The ability to recruit the necessary number of volunteers is vital to carrying out clinical research.” The idea behind the website is to help patients understand how clinical research works, and what it’s like to participate.

The site offers a menu of “basics” about clinical trials, addressing topics like:

There’s an imperfect glossary of terms, a selection of patients’ and investigators’ stories, information for kids in research, and other resources including a link to the clinical trials database: ClinicalTrials.gov.

The 21 study participants all had chronic infection by HCV genotype 1, a strain that’s common in North America and relatively resistant to standard treatment. All subjects were between 18 and 70 years old, with a measurable level of HCV RNA in the blood, no evidence of cirrhosis, and no response to prior HCV treatment (according to criteria detailed in the paper). In the trial, 11 patients received a combination regimen of daclatasvir (60 mg once daily, by mouth) and asunaprevir (600 mg, twice daily by mouth) alone; the other 10 patients took the experimental drugs along with 2 older meds for HCV – Peginterferon (Pegasys, an injectible drug by Roche) and Ribavirin (Copegus, a pill, by Roche).

The main finding is that the 10 patients assigned to take 4 drugs all did strikingly well in terms of reducing detectable HCV in their blood over the course of 24 weeks. There was a dramatic response, also, in 4 of the 11 patients assigned to the new drugs only. An accompanying editorial highlighted the work as a Watershed Moment in the Treatment of Hepatitis C. The medical significance is that they’ve demonstrated proof of principle: by “hitting” a resistant HCV strain with multiple anti-viral drugs simultaneously, they could reduce it to undetectable levels.

The first question you have to ask about this report is why the NEJM – the most selective of medical journals – would publish findings of an exploratory analysis of two new pills paired with two older drugs for HCV. The best answer, probably, is that the virus infects some 4 million people in the U.S. and approximately 180 million people worldwide, according to the study authors. HCV can cause liver damage, cirrhosis, liver cancer (which is usually fatal) and, occasionally blood disorders.

The new drugs derive from some interesting science. This, maybe, also is a factor in why the article was published in the NEJM. Daclatasvir (BMS-790052) blocks a viral protein, NS5A, that’s essential for HCV replication. The second new drug, asunaprevir (BMS-650032) inhibits a viral protease, NS3.

I have several concerns about this report. One is that the researchers screened 56 patients for possible registration but enrolled only 21 on the trial; according to a supplementary Figure 1, 35 potential subjects (over half) didn’t meet criteria for eligibility. This disparity makes any once-researcher wonder about bias in selecting patients for enrollment. If you’re a pharmaceutical company and want to show a new drug or combo is safe, you’re going to pick patients for a trial who are least likely to experience or display significant toxicity.

Toxicity seems like it could be problematic. Diarrhea, fatigue and headaches were common among the study subjects. Worrisome is that 6 patients (of 21, that would be 28.5% of those on the trial) had liver problems manifest by at least one enzyme (the ALT) rising over 3 times the normal limit.

Further complicating the picture is there’s no indication of how these new drugs mesh with the two drugs approved for HCV in 2011: Vic­trelis (boceprevir) and Incivek (telaprevir).

Given all these limitations, you might wonder about BMS’s influence at the Journal or, more likely, the manuscript’s peer reviewers. The 17 study authors, and the editorialist, separately, disclose a host of industry ties.

What I’m thinking, as much as I’m critical of this research work, is that this is probably the way of the future – smaller, pharma-funded studies of targeted new drugs in complicated combinations. Many will be authored by academics with ties to industry, if not put forth directly by company-employed researchers. These quick-and-promising studies in select patient groups will be routine. And while advocates push for rapid publication of new clinical research in patients with resistant, disabling diseases, it’ll be hard for physicians and patients to interpret these kinds of data.

So these particular findings may turn out to be true and life-saving, or not. The bigger concern is this: It would be helpful if the journals would take a really tough stance on full disclosure of authors and editors ties to industry. As Merrill Goozner has emphasized, the Physician Payment Sunshine Act – a small component of the 2010 HCR legislation – has important implications for academic medicine and reporting of clinical research studies.

Tomorrow the American Society of Clinical Oncology* will host its 9th annual GI Cancers Symposium. Bloomberg and the LA Times have already reported findings of a paper, still in abstract form, to be presented on Saturday.

The drug of interest is regorafenib, a pill that loosely inhibits quite a few kinases – enzymes critical in cell signals that control growth of normal cells, tumors and blood vessels. The experimental med, manufactured by Bayer, is also known as BAY 73-4506. The new data emerge from an international, randomized Phase III trial that goes by a loaded acronym: CORRECT.

The study included 760 patients with advanced colon or rectal cancer whose tumor progressed after receiving standard treatments. Participants received either the study drug or BSC (best supportive care) and a placebo. According to the paper, BSC includes antibiotics, pain meds, radiation for bone mets, steroids and some other treatments. The median survival in patients who received the Regorafenib was 6.4 months, compared with 5.0 months in patients who got the placebo. This difference, of 1.4 months in the median, was statistically significant. The “disease control rate” – a term that warrants separate explanation – was 44% in the regorafenib group c/w 15% in the placebo group.

The most frequent high-grade toxicities reported so far include a skin reaction affecting patients’ hands and feet, fatigue, diarrhea, elevated bilirubin in the blood, and high blood pressure. (Question to ask the oncologist who’s presenting these data at the meeting – was the elevated bilirubin from liver damage or hemolysis? With all the $millions spent on this trial, surely someone’s followed up on that detail.)

The language of the report and investigators’ comments are reminiscent of some regarding Avastin for advanced breast cancer. According to a media release: “…a subset of patients in the trial have responded particularly well to regorafenib, continuing to have stable disease for a relatively long time; research is ongoing to find ways to identify these individuals.” There are no biomarkers known to check for Regorafenib responsiveness.

What’s odd is that, according to the abstract, # LBA385, all patients entered the study between May, 2010 and March, 2011. This means some subjects were evaluated for less than a year, and the longest observation period for any patient on the trial is 20 months. Seems early to draw meaningful conclusions about the long-term toxicity and possible benefits of a cancer drug, especially for tumor types, like colorectal cancer, that don’t generally grow fast (c/w a condition like acute leukemia).

The list of investigators’ disclosures regarding ties to industry is too long to post here. You can find them at the tail end of the release. The FDA has assigned Fast Track status to this drug, according to Bayer.

We’ve reached the end of the list, on ideas to reduce oncology costs put forth by Drs. Smith and Hillner in the May 25 issue of the NEJM. Really this 10th and final point intended for oncologists is two-in-one: “The need for cost-effectiveness analysis and for some limits of care must be accepted,” they chart. So doctors should embrace studies of comparative effectiveness and cost effectiveness.

Hard to argue with reason – they’re correct, of course. They write:

… The national imperative is to empower a transparent, acceptable, equitable, politically independent agency for guidance in making tough choices in the public interest so that doctors do not have to make them at the bedside.60 Ultimately, we will have to make decisions based on some criteria, and comparative-effectiveness61 and cost-effectiveness62 analyses are good ways to align resource use with the greatest health benefit.

This sounds great, and is probably right, but I don’t think it’s realistic.

The problem with CER, these authors emphasize, is that most medical patients have more than one condition and many are elderly; clinical trials tend to include, exclusively, patients who don’t have more than one major illness are relatively young. This limits the physicians’ abilities to apply data to their patients.

The heterogeneity of treatment effects will further complicate CER. Although studies typically report average effects, most participants experience more or less benefit and harm than average. Such heterogeneity results from variability in patients’ initial level of risk for a given outcome, in their responsiveness to treatment, and in their vulnerability to adverse effects — issues with particular relevance to patients receiving treatment for multiple coexisting conditions.

The authors, who recognize the need for better research to support treatment decisions, write that “CER will probably accelerate the movement toward outcome-driven decision making, reimbursement, and quality assessment. As this shift occurs, we must move toward a focus on cross-disease, “universal” outcomes in research and clinical care.” Their thesis gets more abstract (which I admire), but meets a wall or two: the lack of consensus on a set of universal health outcomes, different parameters measured by the likes of the VA administration, CMS, the FDA, NIH and other huge agencies.

They make a practical suggestion, about the need for head-to-head comparisons in CER:

… interventions such as exercise that affect multiple conditions simultaneously should be a high priority…Studies should include assessment of the burden of treatments for patients and families. Another CER priority should be the examination of treatments for common pairs of diseases in which treatment of one may exacerbate the other. For example, when hypertension and osteoporosis coexist, what treatment best minimizes the risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes without increasing the risk of falls and fractures?

All of this sounds reasonable to this patient-doctor, but it’ll take a lot of time and money to accomplish effective CER that encompasses the needs and conditions of sufficient numbers of patients in disease and age combinations to power any meaningful studies. You have to wonder at some point, as I have been lately, is all this clinical research worth the effort?

Researchers have largely shied away from the complexity of multiple chronic conditions — avoidance that results in expensive, potentially harmful care of unclear benefit. We cannot improve health care’s quality, effectiveness, and efficiency without addressing its greatest consumers. Development and testing of innovative approaches to care for patients with multiple chronic conditions could prove the most lasting legacy…

My bottom line: CER, and consideration of treatment costs, should underlie reduction of cancer care costs in the near and long-term future. As to how we accomplish sufficiently careful research, and avoid inappropriate cutting of helpful treatments – especially those that prove beneficial for some younger and otherwise healthy cancer patients – is one of the two main challenges ahead.

(The other big challenge, mainly a moral one, is the subject of rationing, to which Smith and Hillner allude but don’t detail, and which subject I won’t address in this post.)

Meanwhile: thorough, apolitical, nuanced and transparent reporting of trial results would help doctors, patients and the general public understand what information is available.

Finally, in the next month or so I will look back over the full, provocative and generally excellent list by Drs. Smith and Hillner, and see what holds hope for the future of cancer medicine. What’s clear is that the path ahead mandates clear thinking through some very tough clinical decisions.

Today’s word comes from Nature News that the NIH is dropping a proposed requirement for universities to disclose researchers’ financial ties to industry on websites. This is a loss for patients, who may not be aware of their doctors’ relationships with pharmaceutical companies and others who fund clinical trials, fellowships, conference junkets and other perks for physicians.

In 2010, NIH Director Francis Collins wrote: “As the nation’s biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must ensure that the research it funds on the behalf of US taxpayers is scientifically rigorous and free of bias.”

This sounds right to me, as it did to the folks at the health and safety arm of Public Citizen, according to the Nature report:

…a cornerstone of that transparency drive — a series of publicly accessible websites detailing such financial conflicts — has now been dropped. “They have pulled the rug out from under this,” says Sidney Wolfe, director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a consumer-protection organization based in Washington DC. “It greatly diminishes the amount of vigilance that the public can exercise over financially conflicted research being funded by the NIH.”

As explained in the article, the proposal came about after evidence came to light that prominent NIH grant recipients had failed to inform their employers (universities and medical schools) about lucrative payments from companies that may have influenced their research. The problem now comes, in part, from lack of funding: the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has no way to enforce the requirement.

That’s no surprise. But it turns out that academic groups lobbied against the requirement. According to the Nature News piece, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges submitted a joint statement objecting that a website detailing physicians’ potential conflicts of interest (COI) would be onerous:

“There are serious and reasonable concerns among our members that the Web posting will be of little practical value to the public and, without context for the information, could lead to confusion rather than clarity regarding financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed.”

As a patient and as a physician who’s cared for patients in clinical trials and served on an institutional review board (IRB), I can’t be more clear in my thinking that the public should know about academic (and all) physicians’ ties with industry. Every institution with NIH funding should make this kind of information readily available and clear to patients. Otherwise, the faculty don’t deserve the NIH support they’re receiving for the research, nor do they deserve the public’s trust in their work.

Patients should be able to find this kind of information readily, before they enroll in clinical trials or decide to undergo any elective procedures, and even before they choose the physician who would guide them in health care decisions.